Azeem Rafiq at Auschwitz: ‘If this doesn’t move you there’s something wrong’

On Wednesday morning Azeem Rafiq’s phone pinged as an email landed in his inbox from a professional sportsman – not a cricketer – seeking his advice about dealing with dressing-room discrimination. Messages like this are not uncommon for Rafiq these days, but the timing of this one was particularly poignant: he received it while he was in Auschwitz, contemplating the most violent and barbaric potential consequences of prejudice.

It is a little more than 18 months since Rafiq first spoke to the media about his experiences of racism at Yorkshire, setting off an explosive chain of events that has led to regime change at Headingley, a long overdue intensification of efforts to increase diversity in the county game, and the England and Wales Cricket Board being ordered to “get its house in order” by the sports minister, Nigel Huddleston. The revelations have also been transformative for Rafiq, turning him from a relatively obscure former cricketer into a public figure and campaigner against discrimination.

“I feel like I’ve been handed this responsibility where a lot of people get in touch with me across the spectrum, from different sports,” Rafiq said that day. “I know what it was like when I was on my own looking for help and no individual wanted to help me and no organisation wanted to help me. I know how it felt to be completely left on my own and I can’t do that to someone else, as much as it takes a lot out of me every time I speak to someone.

“I’m just a normal person from Barnsley and I haven’t really got the tools to help everyone, but it won’t be through lack of trying. One thing I’m not prepared to do is look the other way, because I know how close I came to me taking my own life and in my head I can’t think that